


in their eyes (shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes)

by TolkienGirl



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [301]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Brotherly Love, But also, Celegorm's Bench, Estrela being wonderful, Friendship, Frontier Settlement, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Long One-Shot, Maedhros being a gentle brat, Memories, Mentions of Formenos, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to some pretty awful stuff, Slavery, Violence against women, delving into the history of Gwindor before Maedhros meets him, title from a poem by Wilfred Owen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-09-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:15:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26437786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: Gwindor thought it would be enough, to love in a place of safety. To choose, as he has done now a handful of times, to speak what stayed secret for years of miserable bondage. The pain would be sharp; the wound would bleed. He knew that. But he had thought it would be something possible to endure.[Gwindor tells Maedhros a few good memories of Gelmir. But recollection is not a simple thing.]
Relationships: Arien & Gwindor (Tolkien), Celegorm | Turcafinwë & Gwindor, Gelmir of Nargothrond & Gwindor, Gothmog (Lord of Balrogs) & Gwindor, Gwindor & Maedhros | Maitimo, Gwindor & Original Characters, Maedhros | Maitimo & Maglor | Makalaurë
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [301]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18





	in their eyes (shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes)

I

_At night, the room is shaped in blue. The table and the bench jut out in shadowed ledges. Through the slats of its shutter, the window lets a little silver in among the dark. Gwindor breathes carefully; steps carefully. It’s after midnight. He doesn’t want to wake—_

_But a match scratches like a cat’s claw, and a candle flickers to light._

_“Sneaking, were you?” Gelmir asks, grinning yellow._

_“Oh, blast,” Gwindor mutters, pretending to be affronted. “And here I was trying to keep quiet, and for your own good!”_

_Gelmir sets the candle on the table, and takes a seat on one of their stools beside it. “Did you catch any robbers?”_

_Gwindor shucks off his coat, shaking his head. “No. Tucker’s farm was hit, and a few horses taken, but they were long gone before we took up the trail. We were chasing our tails in the dark.”_

_“Hard luck, Captain,” Gelmir says solemnly. His pale hair is like a cap of corn-silk in the warm flame-glow. Gwindor reaches across the table to ruffle it._

_“Powerful lot of cheek coming from such a young pup,” he says. “Did you sleep at all? You’ve school in the morning.”_

_“I lay abed. But I wanted to hear you ride up.”_

_“Bessie’s had a long night, it’s true. I wiped down her sides and left the blanket on her in the stall.” Gwindor sighs. He’s hungry—he never had supper. But they’re on winter rations, and perhaps—_

_“Don’t you want supper?”_

_How can he refuse?_

_Gelmir flies about the room, one of their blankets streaming out behind his shoulders like a cloak. He’s a weedy lad, at fourteen. Growing too tall for his breeches at the most inconvenient times, such as now, when the Hoosier winter burns cold._

_He looks a good deal like their mother. Gwindor watches him almost hungrily, glad to see that he’s loose-limbed rather than shivering. Glad there is a still a rosy glow to their small woodstove. Glad to be home._

Two days after Fingon discovered the abscess in Russandol’s leg, things are as ordinary as they ever are, in what is often the busiest room in Mithrim. It took some doing, arriving at such a state. The first night after, Russandol was wracked by his dreadful nightmares.

Maglor and Gwindor and Fingon were all present to console him, but in the morning, Fingon suggested that they return to the system of single shifts. The second night, Russandol rested quietly, Maglor said. Yet this is not a victory, to Gwindor’s thinking. Russandol doesn’t like knowing they’re— _fussing_ over him. He’s a sharp lad. He can tell when the order of things changes. When they think he needs to be left alone, or watched, coaxed, coddled. So many ways of loving turn to ashes, after hurt.

Gwindor can understand that.

When it’s his turn, useless hands on awkward knees, his stomach growling on account of growing soft for three meals a day, he looks at Russandol’s vacant face and downcast eyes, and the grief knocks him low—low.

How many times can one man fail?

(He’s thinking of himself.)

Russandol knows when he’s being watched. He twitches a little, and his face tightens into its usual points of guarded charm. Ragged charm, still more present than it should be, after all he’s endured.

“Gwindor,” he murmurs. “Are you burying me?”

“What? No, Red. No. I’m just…”

“Thinking,” Russandol says. “Very well. I’ll be good.” Somehow, it sounds almost mocking. “I shan’t ask what about.”

Gwindor can be just as stubborn as this stripling birch switch of a boy. Still, he doesn’t intend to blurt out, as he does,

“It’s nearly Christmastide.”

Russandol’s face doesn’t slacken again. Instead, it flattens. Careful blankness. More hiding. He says nothing.

“The children,” Gwindor says, since he’s gone and done it—gone and said half of what was living in his mind. Far off, and yet nearer than it has been in a long while, love whispers encouragement. “They don’t even know what Christmas _is_.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” Russandol returns, with a weary tilt of chin towards chest, “That our old quarters were _not_ known for festive holy days?”

 _Glad to hear you’ve yet your saucy tongue_ , Gwindor might reply, but he is driven by a strange longing for sincerity today. He is feeling his way in the blue dark of memory. He is shaping the ashes into their old selves.

He does this because he knows, with the mute, sure sense that only brutal tragedy can develop, that they are running out of time.

Fingon, despite his worries and dashed hopes, still believes in the possibility of healing with all his earnest might.

Fingon has had losses—cruel losses. Gwindor does not think him a child. Gwindor does not think him a fool. But there are evils, yet, that Fingon cannot understand.

Fingon’s youngest brother was shot in the throat, and Fingon could not save him.

What does it say of Gwindor, that he still thinks Fingon _innocent_?

Gwindor says,

“My—Gelmir. Gelmir and I were two alone, but we kept Christmas in our own way.”

_“Can I open my eyes yet? Can I?”_

_“Lord, you’d best pay me for keeping these secrets.”_

_“What secrets?”_

_“You demanding a sack of gifts like a child of five! Wasn’t it just yesterday that you were telling me how great and grand it was to be seventeen? Full a man, and no cause to listen to your elder—”_

_“Oh, come off it, Gwindor. Can I open my eyes?”_

“Gelmir,” Russandol breathes. The name is gentle, musical from him. Gwindor has to take a breath himself, after hearing it spoken so.

“Aye. Our parents were gone. He didn’t remember them—well. Ma died when he was only six, and our father…it wasn’t so long after.” Self-conscious, he mimes a bottle. “The drink.”

Already, Russandol has a better color in his cheeks. “Go on,” he says.

“He wasn’t the whining sort, but he still…he still kept after things. Wanted me to cut down a fir-tree, once, because he’d seen some being dragged back to the village. _We don’t live in the village_ , says I, thinking I can save myself a day’s work. _We don’t need to keep up appearances_. But then I find him sneaking out with the wrong saw and—and a _hammer_ of all things. Says he meant to surprise me. I tell him, _all you’ve done is make me sore ashamed for not having learned you better at our tools._ ”

“You did it for him?”

“Yes.” Gwindor pauses. Grins, a little fiercely, mindful that tears are rarely as far as one might wish. “Turns out that was his plan, taking useless things and making a fair bit of noise about it.”

Russandol—nestles, is the only word for it, among the bedclothes. Almost looks like his body belongs to him again, for a moment. “They’re quite like that,” he says.

“So they are,” Gwindor agrees. “Well, we cut our fir-tree—oh, must have been six feet high. And us with a cabin only having two rooms, two _small_ rooms. _Not to mention_ , I said, _we’ve nothing to put on this here tree_. But he didn’t mind. It _was_ a fresh and fragrant thing. He was all of twelve. Our first winter in—Indiana, it was. We stayed there four years. I had no trade or calling worth holding fast to one place or t’other. So I stationed myself as a jack-of-all-trades at first, got the old cabin on a song. It was outside the village, you see.” He feels a little giddy, a little light-headed. He mustn’t think, now, of how many years it has been that he locked these words inside him. The telling is doing Russandol good.

“The boys were terribly fond of our trees,” Russandol says. “And so was I—though I find myself in accord with Gelmir. There is nothing like the beauty of one _untrimmed_. Looking as if it might have sprouted out of the floorboards.”

Gwindor cannot believe his good luck. To have Russandol talking like himself again—no, better than that! Talking like the self that _used to be_. Gwindor would stake his life on it that this is the Russandol who lived _before_ , or at least a shadow of him. It’s enough to make a man more than giddy; it’s enough to make him drunk, and to keep him drinking. Never mind that poison lies in these dregs.

_Have a drink, Soldier._

(No.)

“Anyway, on account of him,” Gwindor says, “I’ve been thinking on Sticks and Frog. We haven’t a _sack_ of presents…”

“Oh, I have a few old things that might be polished up for them,” Russandol says, as close to _eager_ as Gwindor’s seen him this side of hell—or ever. “And Caranthir—you should ask Caranthir. He has always been one for gifts and treasures.”

“That’s a fair plan,” Gwindor says, nodding slowly. “A fair plan. You know…” And this is dangerous territory, even more than before, “Sticks’ hair. That’s the color of _his_ , just about.”

“Perhaps Sticks is your distant cousin,” Russandol suggests softly. He smiles with one side of his mouth. “We must tell her. She could call you _uncle_.”

Gwindor glares, just for show. “She and I would beat each other to the _nay_ , there.”

“She’s a dear little scrap,” Russandol says. “I have no sisters. As such, I’m rather frightened of her.”

They both know that isn’t true.

After a moment, Russandol asks, “Have you spoken to Estrela of your plan?”

“Haven’t had an opportunity.”

“Ah.” Russandol sighs faintly. “What with always sitting with me.”

“No, that’s not—”

“So what did you gift him?” Russandol interrupts. “That Christmas he was twelve?”

_“Oh, it’s slick, Gwindor. All the other lads’ll be jealous of it—oh, it’s a regular Bowie. Look at that edge!”_

“I rustled up a set of jacks, I think. Some sort of child’s game. A pretty sorry showing.”

(A knife. He gave him a knife.)

“You must ask Fingon, too, for advice about presents. Once he brought me a hamper of—ham and pickles, I think, when I was ill. Very hearty. Maglor was in sandwiches for weeks.”

“Maglor had an appetite, once?” Damn, that did not land quite right. Maglor is a sore subject with Russandol, in ways dull Gwindor cannot possibly understand. “I only mean—”

“It’s true,” Russandol says. “I was the pettish one. Just as I am now.” His voice twists, there at the end.

Gwindor tries to be like Fingon, Fingon who did not stop in his work of two days ago until the neat black stitches had closed the clean wound. Afterwards, Fingon dashed tears from his eyes in the hall, but he did not weep before Russandol.

Gwindor has done that already. He has wept; he has spoken amiss. He has spoken too little, and now, in baring the love beneath his heart’s wound, he has driven himself a little mad with speaking out the past.

But Russandol mustn’t see that. Gwindor must save it all for the hall.

Thus, one more story.

“You’ve nothing to the trials Gelmir gave me over green vegetables,” he says. “Lord, I thought us in luck to have anything that wasn’t brined within an inch of its life and packed in a barrel! Course, I had no touch in the garden myself, but his schoolmarm when he was still small—when we were first alone—brought us some of her bounty. Snap peaks and lettuces and cabbages, too. It was magnificent.”

“Perhaps she fancied you,” says Russandol, almost slyly.

Gwindor can feel himself flush, more in surprise at the near-accuracy of the guess than anything else. “Not that one. I was still a lad myself. Eighteen and mighty wet behind the ears. But—” he pauses, clears his throat. “Again in Indiana, there was one. Right as we were fixing to move on, Gelmir up and asks me if I’m not to marry Miss Pratt after all.”

“Poor Miss Pratt!”

“I hadn’t a gol-darned idea of it. She’d been setting her cap at me for years, Gelmir said. Now maybe he was lying but I, a more loose-lipped fellow then than now, asked around among the militia. Cautious-like _I thought_ , but in the end I received resounding confirmation _and_ enough hounding to make me shake the dust from my heels in double-time.”

Russandol flattens his hand against his chest while his lips and throat jump.

Gwindor is shot through with guilt. “Oi, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to make you laugh. Didn’t think I _could_.”

“You sell yourself short,” Russandol replies, coughing a little painfully, but making no complaint. He does not ask for water—he never does. “Both to me and to Miss Pratt.”

Gwindor swears more volubly. “I never should have told you. Cursing myself all over again.”

“I’ll be the soul of discretion.” Russandol’s fingers crook and flatten, crook and flatten. He’s moving his hand without knowing it—at least Gwindor hopes. “I’ve been privy to many such a secret in my day.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Gwindor chuckles. Then he worries that he has gone wrong again, and so he says, “I’ll ask Estrela, just as you said. And I’ll want your opinion, for I don’t know if Miss Sticks will like my taste.”

Fingon comes in, then. He has brought Russandol’s breakfast. As far as Gwindor knows, Russandol has not yet eaten for himself. He relies on Fingon’s hands to guide the spoon, to mop his face. There is something not quite like easy obedience, there, in his eyes and the lines of his mouth.

Privately, Gwindor believes that they both deserve better.

Presently, Gwindor is sinking deep, deep.

“I’ll rustle up some breakfast myself,” he says, rising from Celegorm’s bench. “If you don’t mind.” (Of course Russandol will say he does not.)

In the hall, the tears don’t come as he expected them to. A strange, grey weight has descended upon him instead. He carries it out of doors, blinking aimlessly in the sunshine. Clouds roll in before noon; the air turns oppressive with the promise of snow or rain.

His shoulder aches terribly.

_This one—this one’s cracked, sir. He’s out of his head._

No, _said a slow, laden, river-bottom voice_. No, I don’t think he is.

Estrela is very pleased by the prospect of making gifts for the children. “Amras has something in mind,” she says, conspiratorially. “He has showed me some fine whittling.”

“Amras. Little Red.” He’s almost pretending not to know who she means. (He does.)

“Yes. He’s a dear boy. Very kind to Frog. He _tries_ to be kind to Sticks, but they are like two wild goat kids. Prancing about each other, ready to fight.”

Gwindor chuckles at that. He has long known Estrela to be capable of humor, but she kept that (like all tender parts of herself) quiet and humble during their years together. She had to.

It is good to hear her speak more freely now.

He cannot help her in the garden very long that afternoon, because of the pain. She will not let him. He grumbles to preserve his dignity, but in truth he is relieved to walk beside her back to the fort. They go around back. She pauses in the yard, and stands with her arms folded tightly over her chest.

“It is strange,” she says. “It is still so strange.”

He is silent.

“To imagine him here. With—with his leg right and his hand—without all the hurts they did him—”

“I know,” Gwindor murmurs, for he must say _something_. “I know.”

The clouds belong to him, or he to them. There is a darkness rolling, covering him, taking him thought by thought and word by word. It’s the price you pay for digging deep. The sky and the ground open up, and one or the other is enough to devour you.

The fort faces a minor crisis at supper, when it is discovered that they cannot find Frog.

“It wasn’t _mine_ to mind him!” Sticks claims shrilly, but she’s pasty as a pan of milk.

Instead of scolding, Gwindor seizes her shoulder and gives it a little encouraging shake. He’s surprised at himself. “It’s all right, Sticks. Nobody’s blaming you. Where’d you see him last?”

She does not remember. The hall—no, the garden. Beren and Wachiwi and Aredhel, frequent playmates of the little imp, have no new information to provide.

“Perhaps he is visiting Russandol,” Estrela says at last. “I told him that Russandol sometimes slept in the afternoon, but I should not have expected him to always remember…”

This simple answer is, of course, the truthful one. Gwindor and Estrela go together. They find Fingolfin and Fingon in their opposite chairs, reading by lamplight. Russandol is not sleeping, but his eyes are half-shut. His left arm is curved wide and open around the huddled limbs and round dark head of Frog.

“Oh, _graças a Deus_ ,” Estrela chants under her breath, but they both stand frozen, just inside the door, not wanting to disturb the invalid’s repose.

Fingolfin glances up and smiles at them, and then clears his throat with a faint _harrumph_ as if he is embarrassed. “I hope you have not troubled over the little fellow,” he says. “He came in at sundown—we let him stay.”

“Maitimo says it is no trouble,” Fingon says.

And Maitimo-Russandol opens his eyes, only to blink ingratiatingly at Gwindor and Estrela.

Frog snores.

Gwindor is punished for his earlier liberties. His heart is in his mouth, pulse leaping between his ears. It is all unburied.

Thankfully, he is concealed by the doings of other people. Estrela tiptoes forward, and crouches beside Frog’s body.

“You can leave him,” Russandol whispers. “He must be tired. You can leave him, Estrela. Please.”

Estrela was looking at Frog, to see if the little mischief-maker stirred, but now she is looking at Russandol. Gwindor has known her face long enough to know its capacity for great tenderness.

“If you say so,” she murmurs, and rises. Her fingers link, pressed at her waist. She steps back, but not—away.

Too soft, too near. There is nothing that changes a man more than the memory of dear blood spilling, but there is nothing that _breaks_ a changed man more than when he is forced to pluck up old stones and look beneath them.

_There you were. His elbows against your ribs. His hair against your cheek. It is a long winter, but you will not let him freeze or starve. You will not leave him._

Quietly, Gwindor retreats from the room. 

In the stable, the horses huff clouds of steam. But for the occasional nicker and lazy stamp, it is very still. Gwindor knows that Mollie sleeps up above—though when the nights are truly cold, she comes within the walls. That is the sort of place Mithrim is. Here, one has the freedom to choose.

_Fire, raging eternal, thrums in the muscle and joint together. The whole arm hangs sick and loose from shoulder to elbow, at which point it is turned and drawn back behind him, bound with rough cord._

_If it weren’t for the pain in that arm, he would think he was dead._

_His breath is still coming in screams. With his voice gone, these are bone-rattled, rasping things. His throat is sore and desert-parched, heaving so that his breast and shoulders heave with it. He doesn’t—understand that. Doesn’t understand, either, how his eyes can be molten bullets, trapped between brow and brain, yet they are._

_Brow and brain, pressed to the earth, but not beneath it._

_Not yet._

_If it weren’t for the hand in his hair, lifting him away from his grub-bellied crawl into hiding, he would think himself dead._

You there. You’ve had a bad go of it, eh?

Gwindor stretches out on the straw in an empty stall. Mithrim’s stable carries no holes in its roof. He cannot see the stars.

_Gothmog has shoulders that are twice as thick as Gwindor’s were, when Gwindor’s hung straight. His eyes are not the Devil’s, for Gwindor has seen those eyes. These are sharp and cold, and Gwindor does not beg death from them. Dimly, he tries to understand whether or not he seeks survival or salvation, and fails._

If you wanted to be dead, _Gothmog says_ , I think you’d be dead already.

_Gwindor sobs. No sound left in him, now. No air. But he sobs._

I’ve been looking for a man like you. Rest are going to a coal mine, but you’ll come with me. You like that, boy? For I like the looks of you.

Russandol, beautiful and rare and magnificent as he is, thinks himself an outcast because men hate him. Gwindor wonders if he has ever been, or will ever _be_ , capable of understanding the truth of the matter: that they feared him, because he could never be wholly theirs.

_We followed you. Did you not think to wonder why? You’ve got the spark in you that lights the future._

_Without the use of one arm, without the use of his heart, what is left of him? His tongue is silent. His eyes are blinded by the images of a single quarter-hour, blazing and bloody on an open field. The rest of the men whom he knew_ before _pass like ghosts in single file, taken to secret coal mines of the north and west. Their necks are laden with iron. Their faces are sallow with nauseated shock. Theirs is a story that nobody will remember to tell; slaves forgotten by a free land._

_He doesn’t know them anymore. He doesn’t know anything._

_The river carries him out, shackling his ankles, loading him into a wagon of shivering women. Favoring him, occasionally, with a draught of hard, bright liquor._

_The river tells him that he isn’t dead._

II

Gwindor does not count the days. To be a slave—at least, to be a slave traveling west along an unknown road—is little easier or harder than any life or journey that could otherwise now be his. The first day, or night (it was a time of black hours) two men held him by the arms while a third hammered a heavy ring around his ankle. Had he been inclined to speak, or more than half-conscious of what they were doing, he could have told them that they had no need to fear him fighting.

All the same, they pressed his injured shoulder hard. This kept him writhing weakly, head swimming, while they worked.

The cuff, which he examines dully as the wagon resumes its brutal, rumbling pace, has a smaller ring welded to it. Through this, he comes to learn, a length of chain is threaded at nightfall. It connects him to the other dazed men and the terrified women. Linked like yoked oxen, or pack dogs.

The men are young fellows, mostly. As young as—

(Black hours.)

Gothmog is the name of the bullnecked leader with the low, muddy voice. When they encamp, the slaves do not seem to interest him. He smokes a pipe and talks with his own men. His laughter comes rarely; when it does, it is the one sound that Gwindor recognizes as distinct through the haze of his blood-thrumming ears. It is not a friendly laugh. It is deep and throaty and content.

There are dozen paid hands, no more. They have somewhat better rations and move more freely. That is all. Rations are spare for everyone; sleep comes easily to no one.

For his part, Gwindor shakes like an invalid against the stony ground, not resting, nor yet really waking, until a kick to the spine or legs announces that morning is come again.

He does not remember much of the days.

“We've been on the road a month,” Gothmog says, twirling a matchstick between his fingers. "And you’ve not spoken a word to anyone. Least, not that I’ve heard.”

A month! Gwindor stares at his wrists. One of the men bound them before him when he was brought to Gothmog’s pitched tent. The tent is broad enough to make space for a bedroll, cushioned both by blankets and furs, and a small table, at which Gothmog sits. Two more empty chairs are beside it. Perhaps they are spending several days in this mountain-shadowed place; long enough for the leader to make himself comfortable.

Perhaps they already have.

On Gwindor’s right forearm, a red welt snakes like a lazy worm. He stares at it, startled and distracted, for he does not remember receiving it.

“All right,” Gothmog drawls, rising. He’s a big man. Not fat, just—solid. Shoulders, waist, thighs. Arms twice as wide as Gwindor’s. His steps cannot shake the earth. No man’s could. But they _seem_ to.

Gwindor doesn’t know what will happen to him. Doesn’t think death would he kind enough to come from this man.

Then Gothmog slaps him across the face, so hard that all the world is full of Gelmir again, starry-haired, fighting fierce.

The pain in his bad shoulder seizes him, drags him back. Gothmog is gripping it.

“Drink,” Gothmog says. Metal touches Gwindor’s lips. Not a blade; not something to take the tongue that does not speak. He sucks and swallows and it is burning, burning liquor.

Gothmog’s breath smells of the liquor, and of tobacco. His dark eyes crawl over Gwindor’s face. At long last, he lets Gwindor go.

“Sit you down,” he says. “Now that we’ve cleared the cobwebs from your head.”

Gwindor takes one of the chairs.

“Can you talk?” Gothmog asks, tapping a thing, blunt-nailed finger against the tabletop. “Or must I knock you again?’

Gwindor says, “I can talk.” His head aches.

Gothmog removes his hat, revealing spiked tufts of dull, dark hair. On the table, the lantern light catches in the silver band.

“The order was to take you all alive,” Gothmog says. “But I’ve found orders are worthless as shit where Mairon is concerned.” He must see the emptiness on Gwindor’s face, for he adds, impatiently, “The French devil. You remember him, eh?”

The strange, grinding breath that saws through air, through the canvas walls of the tent—does it belong to _him_? Does anything—at all—belong now to the howl of a soul that is Gwindor?

“You’re my dog,” Gothmog says, unperturbed. He leans forward. Smiles, then: full hard lips over stained, even teeth. “I’ll chain you. That’s the lot of a dog. I’ll beat you if I have to.” He pauses. Taps his finger again. “But we can have a fine life together, you and I, if you’ll do what you’re told. You can have a whole body of bones.”

Gwindor does not care much for life. Slave or no. Dog or no. It isn’t life, any longer.

“Christ, you’re slow. I have no use for the mad bastard, see? Do you want to kill him?”

Gwindor’s head clears. “Kill Mairon?”

The smile widens. “Aye, there you have it.”

_Frog wakes up hungry, and submits to being carried away in Estrela’s arms to supper._

_“I’s didn’t sleep last night,” he explains coyly. “I sleep two times today.” He holds his fingers up._

_“You must be stiff, Maitimo,” Fingon says, when the door shuts behind Estrela. “How is your arm?”_

_“I’m well,_ cano. _” There is pain—there is always pain—in his thin face, but Gwindor recognizes the ember of peace warming him from within, where only cold and horror lived before._

_Later, when Fingon has stepped away, Russandol says to Gwindor, low,_

_“If you can imagine Celegorm_ small _, even smaller than Frog…he used to curl just so. Like a—a ground-squirrel, I suppose. Nose to knee.”_

_Fingolfin, Gwindor notices, lifts his book a little higher. Concealing a smile? The man remains a plain-faced, kindly mystery._

_“Celegorm would not like to be compared to a squirrel now,” Gwindor replies, and Russandol—yes. That is a smile. One of his tiny, fleeting smiles, which slips a knife between Gwindor’s ribs and twists it gently._

_“I felt it the greatest honor in the world,” he says, half to himself, “That I, at six, could coax him to sleep in the afternoons. He rose so early, even as a babe—”_

_Gwindor hates what they both have suffered. Celegorm lives; it is Maedhros who is broken, but the grief is familiar. He hates that he can reach out and touch only the signs of Russandol’s hurt, not what they have lost. No graves for them! No rest. No warmth beyond the embers._

_Yet, for love, Gwindor blows a little on the flame._

_He says, hoping that Fingolfin takes no particular notice, “No better feeling than knowing they’ll only go quiet for you, eh?”_

It goes like this: their destination veers north, landing them, for a time, among the plains. There are shanty towns waiting for them. There are surveyors waiting there, with faces stripped hatchet-thin by the endless winds, and they trade information with Gothmog, who seems to always have both too much and too little to do.

In exchange for weeks’ worth of conversation, speculation, and red ink bloodying creased maps, Gothmog orders his men to order the slaves to build. Winter is coming—shanties won’t do against northern winters—and the surveyors aren’t fair-weather prospectors.

They’re here to stake permanent claims.

“Until we buy you out,” Gothmog says, half-friendly. He does not say who _we_ is.

“We earned this land fair and proper,” chuckles one man. “Scared all the Dakotas off.”

Gwindor, who has been struggling by with a water bucket on each arm during this exchange, sees Gothmog shift his stance. He can imagine the lifted brows.

“ _All_ of ‘em?”

A raiding party goes out that night. All dozen of Gothmog’s men. They bring back only a few girls. Gwindor is _awake_ , sharp and aware of every sight and sound around him. He has not known such aching clarity since— _since_. The gift is a savage one. He finds that there is still enough of a man living under his cold-sweating skin for him to hate.

Sometimes, Gothmog calls him in for another sip of whiskey. He asks questions, most of them mocking. Most of them flat and disinterested. _How old are you, Soldier?_ (For he has remembered that Gwindor was taken with the militiamen.)

Gwindor answers, _Twenty-eight._

Lost and ashamed, he begins to take notice of the women. It seems only fair, since he is a willing dog for their vicious master. The women who cook and wash and serve Gothmog’s men are thin and bruised. They have no hope, of course, for there is none, here. Gwindor does not consider his chance at vengeance to be hope.

He does not remember when he first saw the child. A six-month babe, scrawny and too quiet for health. The sight of his tiny head, dark above the rags that swaddle him to a stranger’s breast, is a sight too simple and profound to be viewed by eyes that know only ruin and rage. As such, Gwindor does not look often at the child. Blocks his ears to the thin, occasional wails.

He does not remember when he first saw the stranger, either. She cannot be the child’s mother, to Gwindor’s half-absent reckoning, because she does not suckle him. Long after, he realizes that this was but a foolish shade for his real reasoning. A foolish shade for his shameful judgment of her. Curse him thrice over, for that!

If she had a face like other women, it would remain half as it is: the broad, intelligent forehead. The tilted nose. Gwindor tries to see these, in apology for what he has also seen and let swallow him: the eyeless, lidless socket. The twisted line of a mouth.

He does not hold these harms against her. It is only—

It is only—

(He loses his way.)

Gwindor knows a fair amount about building. Enough to forget himself a bit, just as he’s remembered what his hands can do. He tells one of Gothmog’s moonfaced paid underlings that he’s hammering a nail in at the wrong angle, and speaks sharp.

A mistake, he realizes, when his face is in the dust and his back is smarting with blows from the man’s walking stick. Fancy carrying about a walking stick when you’re supposed to be minding the rise of a wall! Gwindor thinks the man doubly a fool, as he shields his head with his good arm.

He’s brought into the largest shanty that night. He expects more blows. Instead, he’s given whiskey.

“Temper in you,” Gothmog says. He swigs back his flask, then dribbles the dregs into the tin cup he has allowed Gwindor. “And over work you don’t care to do!”

“It’s work.” Gwindor has learned, by now, that he is expected to answer. “It’s all work.”

“Listen to you. You were a man afore this—but you weren’t a thinking man, were you?” Gothmog leans back, settles the heavy heel of one boot on his knee. “You know what they says to me when I come on that scene? They says, _This one’s out of his head._ Say you lost a brother. Mairon took him to pieces.”

Gwindor can see it all, but he feels nothing. What do you call that? What can anyone call it?

“That’s a hard thing to see, I don’t doubt. That would ruin some folks. But you…you just set back on your heels when it was over. They said you’re out of your head? I think you’re in it. That’s why I offered you revenge.”

Nothing.

“If you wanted to be dead, you’d be dead. If you thought there was shame in being a chained man, you’d fight it. But you hardly fight it, Soldier. Makes me think you’re of the class that knows what it’s meant for.”

Nothing, nothing, nothing like—

“So make free. Tell me how you’ll kill him,” Gothmog says softly. “Tell me how you’ll start.”

_“I confess I did not expect an improvement so soon,” Fingolfin says, passing the basket of bread to Gwindor without being asked. “But seeing him with little Frog today—and watching him speak so comfortably to you—”_

_“Don’t think too much of it,” Gwindor returns, closing his hand around a thick-cut crust. It’s still a curiosity, to have bread that’s well worth eating. “There’s a calm before the storm, with these things.”_

_Fingolfin does not seem alarmed by this dour declaration. He eats his boiled vegetables in thoughtful silence. “I am glad all the same,” he says at last. “With friends like you beside him, my hope for Maedhros grows.”_

They do not all stay for the winter. Gothmog drive his slaves south, speaking sometimes in Gwindor’s hearing of how he misses the Old South. He thins the herd before they depart; that is, he leaves half of his men and a few of the women behind him, staking with the surveyors.

Gwindor wonders, at first, at the wisdom of such a plan. Cutting across large swaths of territory runs a great risk of entanglement with natives, or with other men who would question their business. But before they’ve gone fifty miles, Gothmog is satisfied that they are within reach of known aid.

“Fort Bernard,” he announces, when the two remaining wagons are wedged around a fire. Gwindor and the other male slaves are made to keep watch in the shadows beyond the wagons, but they can overhear what Gothmog says. “We’ve friends there. Friends and a properly organized militia—” he says _this_ with savoring slowness—“That will accompany us until we reach the civilized land of Texas. If any of you-all speak to someone as is _not_ a friend, and tell them a story that is _not_ for a stranger’s ear, I will put a bullet in each of your eyes and I will leave you to the coy-otes. Do not test me.”

Just then, the baby starts to cry. Gwindor ceases breathing.

Gothmog speaks again, above the plaintive noise:

“Now, Belle, you shut that frog-faced critter up before he brings the Comanches down on us. You’ve still your tits, haven’t you?”

On the other side of the wagons, Gwindor sinks his teeth into his knuckles. There is a rustle—no doubt the woman who does nurse the child moves in to take the child from Belle’s arms.

The crying stops.

_“You needn’t trouble yourself, Gwindor,” Russandol says, even while his hand locks Gwindor’s in an iron grasp. Even while his face is turned as hard away as it can be, from the sight of Fingon salving the fading burn that caps his vacant wrist. “You needn’t.”_

_Gwindor wasn’t even speaking of Gelmir, this day. He is flat-out determined to try, but he finds that this resolve has to be measured like breaths drawn between plunges under water. Even so, the nightmares are enough to threaten drowning._

_“You mind your own troubles, Red,” he says. “You mind what Fingon says.”_

_Fingon is carefully saying nothing._

_Russandol keeps looking at Gwindor, not at Fingon. “And what about you?” he asks. “Will_ you _mind what Fingon says? For_ cano _—” and now his gaze shifts, entreating—“If you could only_ see _what a hurt his shoulder bears…”_

In Texas, Gothmog is a king. The man was an overseer of old plantations, and Gwindor knew this. But Gwindor didn’t know—or hadn’t the quickness of mind to guess—that a barricaded fort was waiting for them among the foothills, ignored by the Army and un-assaulted by the Comanche.

Within those walls, a different army grows.

An army of slaves: men and women and children, snatched up from settlements without recourse to the larger towns and cities of the nearer-east. Escapees from the same sort of plantations Gothmog knew, trying to move to anonymous freedom, are also taken. And Natives, especially those separated from their tribes by war and famine.

Gothmog rules these operations with ultimate power but without much observable interest. He does not ride out with his catchers. He does not hammer the shackles round ankles, the collars around the most rebellious throats. He does, however, take his choice among the women.

Then he sends them away. The men go west. The children, too often, die. The women die too, or are sold to secret bidders. Gwindor is beginning to understand dimly why Gothmog knows so well where it is safe for him to go, to barter. It seems almost as if a higher power yet than him is the one directing each move, even each shipment of poor souls.

Gwindor takes his knocks and lashes with the rest of them. Takes short rations and sleeps, most painfully, on the packed earth floor. Keeping watches, cleaning weapons, treating hides—all become slave-tasks. But Gwindor is not treated _quite_ like the rest.

Gwindor, when new slaves arrive, is prompted to escort them to their temporary quarters. Gwindor is questioned by the foul breed of overseers that Gothmog has taken to hiring. They keep after him for information about misconduct, about attempts to flee, though at all times he offers nothing more than _yes_ and _no_ and _I don’t know_.

He never gives anyone away. His questioners are dissatisfied time and again, leaving him with a curse and a cuff for their troubles. Goodley, the taciturn newcomer with a taste for violence, lays him flat with one blow, then takes him up by the shirtfront so as to administer a few more. Gwindor wants to kill him.

“You didn’t strike back,” Gothmog says, over a thick-cut beefsteak. Gwindor hasn’t eaten since the morning mess. He stands at attention. “Goodley’s greener than you are, Soldier. Much greener. Don’t it gall? That I hired him and mastered you?” He waits, there, expectantly. As if Gwindor would put himself like tinder to a spark of ready rage. “Don’t think on it,” Gothmog croons at last. Soft-voiced, but he isn’t smiling. It’s been a long while since Gothmog smiled. “There tain’t no meaning in it. It’s just chance. Chance that puts you on your knees and him on the rise.” Another pause. Then he says, cold and low, “Why don’t you get on your knees, Soldier. I want to be sure.”

 _Vengeance_ , Gwindor tells himself, like a prayer whispered back into his own mouth. He lowers himself, his good arm helping him. Gothmog watches, still as a snake poised to strike. At last he murmurs,

“Would you look at that.”

It’s been a long while since Gothmog promised that Gwindor would have his kill.

The days are getting longer. Gwindor hears one of the overseers say that it is March, and loses the rest of the day to the red smear of his darkest thoughts.

March was a birth month: that is all, and that is everything.

Somewhere in this grating stretch of days and boundless weeks comes Lem.

Lem is dazed and stubborn, like a steer that finds itself penned in for slaughter and wonders, in its dumb animal way, if it should have fought as hard as would a bull. Though he doesn’t seek out trouble, he doesn’t yet know how to fend it off. Therefore he is given the lash more than anyone, and he yells when he gets it.

Gwindor has no strong inclination towards or against him. He supposes he admires the man’s spirit for not yet knowing itself broken, just as he admires poor Belle, who takes whatever children she can to herself, who comforts the dying.

An animal has gnawed voraciously at one corner of the fort’s outer wall. A beaver, someone said. Gwindor doesn’t care what did it; he is only concerned with the task to which he and Lem are appointed: cutting slats from knotty, uneven hardwood and mending the gap.

It’s hell on his shoulder.

“Lor, I could just _run_ ,” Lem growls, when the overseer is out of sight. A new batch have come in; others have moved on. Goodley’s gone, for one, and Gwindor hopes he never sees him again.

“Wouldn’t get far,” Gwindor answers, low.

“I’m not a slave,” Lem spits angrily. “I’m a free farmer. A militiaman. All we need is a settlement. A blacksmith—”

“They’ll take those that cause trouble to ‘em,” Gwindor answers. “We’re in the middle of nothing and nowhere. All we were told about freedom was lies, see? Color of your skin don’t decide it. Family name don’t decide it. There’s something else at work here and it’ll crush every last one of us. Keep your head down and maybe we’ll have our chance when we’re not a hundred miles into hell.”

Lem stares at him, open-mouthed. Then he grins under his scrub beard. “Most I’ve ever heard you say, Soldier.”

Gwindor shuts his mouth.

Lem goes on, “Heads down, eh? All right. All right.”

This resolve does not last overlong.

Back at the inner gate, one of the overseers, a thickset fellow by the name of Lewis, stops them and Harris.

“This one here’s a thief,” Lewis says, pointing at Lem.

“What?” Lem demands, bristling. His stubbornness is roused. Gwindor clenches his jaw.

“Shut your trap,” Harris commands, striking Lem. To Lewis, “What’s the trouble?”

“My flask gone missing,” Lewis says.

“Well, and what of it?” Lem, it seems, is itching for another blow. “I ain’t take it. Been breaking my back all morning with Soldier, here.”

“Found the flask in your rags,” Lewis says, folding his arms.

“And I saw you sipping at breakfast,” Lem retorts, earning the second knock. “So when am I to have stole it?”

“Were you watching them all the while?” Lewis asks Harris.

Harris considers for too long a moment. Shakes his head. “Stepped away to take a piss,” he says. “Took my time, honestly. They were going back in and out of the main wall, what with patching. He could’ve…”

“You must have more piss in you than a horse,” Lem spits. “And I must have more—”

“I was with him,” Gwindor interrupts. He’s tired of listening to Lem’s beatings. Maybe he can head this one off at the past. “I was with him all the while, sir. He couldn’t have done it.”

“An odd pair, you and Lem,” Gothmog muses, shoving the familiar tin cup across the table with two fingers. His chamber here is five times as large as the old tent. He has a proper bed, broad-framed, and a row of coat-hooks driven into the long wall. Rope hangs in loops; boots, new and old, are heaped in the corner. There is a flat wooden box open on the solid table that Gwindor helped to build; inside the box is a new bullwhip. Silver-handled, and flecked with steel nibs, it glitters.

Gwindor takes the hardbacked chair. Takes the cup and drinks. The welts on his shoulders sting.

“How many did Lewis give you?” Gothmog asks.

“Ten.”

“Through the shirt?”

“Yes.”

“And with that short snake of his. Not bad.” Gothmog chuckles. “Well then, I’ll come clean. I told ‘em to set you up. You and Lem.”

Gwindor swallows the whiskey.

“I wanted to see where your loyalties lay,” Gothmog says. “And you might think I’ll doubt you, but it ain’t so, Soldier. I like to know you’ve cottoned to your own kind.” He heaves a great breath like bellows fanning. It whistles as it leaves his teeth. “Grant you, there’s a limit. You turn on _me_ and—there’s your limit.”

Gwindor sets the cup aside. What he says next is too foolish and too quiet to really be bravery.

“You never meant to give me Mairon, did you?” he asks.

The silence lasts long. The thing in the box gleams.

“Go on,” Gothmog says. “Back to your quarters.”

_A week until Christmas. Whatever hubbubs may disturb Mithrim’s peace by day, due to family squalls and ancient history and everything in between, Gwindor’s focus is trained solely on the crises that come at night._

_Sometimes it’s worse when Russandol isn’t screaming._

_“Please,” Russandol chokes, “Please, Athair—Athair—” He gags so sharply that he wakes himself, flung upwards as if thrust from behind. His hand beats helplessly against both of Gwindor’s, which are offered to him palm-up._

_To Gwindor’s surprise, Russandol does not wait for Gwindor to declare himself, to say his own name. Instead he pitches into Gwindor’s breast as if to hide there._

_Gwindor rests his chin on the lad’s sweat-damp hair, carefully moves his arms around the shaking shoulders. Touches the scarred skin gently, under his hand. It is warm, and a heart beats through it._

_On the floor on the other side of the bed, useless Maglor stirs and groans._

_“Maitimo? Maitimo what is it?”_

_“He’s all right,” Gwindor mutters. “Go back to sleep.”_

One of the girls gets free, in the middle of the day, when a number of them are out collecting kindling. Lewis chases her down, and then—two shots.

The girl is dead. Lewis is winged.

There were two guns.

Gwindor doesn’t pray, of course. Can’t. But he offers a glad, vicious, jealous thought of praise for that girl. She died bold.

He doesn’t shake this thought from his face soon enough.

“You knew something, Soldier?” Harris and the rest are at him. Questioning, questioning. _How did she get the gun? How did she know how to use it?_

She was not a favorite of any of the men; she’d spent no time in their barracks. She had help, they’re sure of it. Gwindor knows the wild courage of youth, though he’d seal his mouth with a hot iron before admitting that. He knows in his head and his heart that the girl likely acted alone.

“They’re cold bastards,” Lem mutters, chewing his bread and scant salt pork ferociously. “Putting a poor brat down like an animal—”

“Keep your voice down,” Gwindor warns. “There’s a fighting mood.”

“Damn right there is!”

Lewis stalks near, whining over his injured arm. Lem gets that hard, stubborn look in his eyes, and thrusts his leg out into the man’s path. Gwindor hauls it back just in time.

“You’ll get yourself fucking killed,” he hisses.

Lem subsides.

Gwindor goes back to his meal. Catches the gaze of a saucer-eyed girl with pale, corn-silk hair. She can’t be more than six.

He looks away.

_You’d forgive me_ , he thinks. _I know you would. But you can’t, and so I needn’t trouble myself. Needn’t trouble myself at all. My little lad…my little lad. If there’s a second world, let me find you._

He lies awake. Waits for his exhausted comrades to breathe steadily with sleep. Rolls up on his good arm, and creeps out.

The overseer barracks are fitted out with cots. A bedframe or two. There are women tangled with some of the men. Poor things. Gwindor wishes a gentle death on them, or a bold death, whichever would feel less like a curse to them.

Death isn’t a curse at all, to him. He’ll take one of the guns from beside these thick, stupid bodies, bodies that haven’t learned their lesson, even while Lewis wheezes in pained dreams. Gwindor will take the gun and slip it into his mouth. He will die, therefore, a little like Gelmir died, with a name on a tongue that can no longer speak it.

He’s scarcely past the doorway when he sees a moving shape.

Damn it all.

_Lem._

“I find it a mite strange,” Gothmog says, twirling the three-pronged fork between finger and thumb, “That you couldn’t settle your business in your own quarters. Wanted an audience, did you? Wanted to show yourselves as men to your masters?”

“He run,” Gwindor says, staring at the floor. “I chased him.”

“You chased Lem, Soldier?”

If Lem knows anything, he’ll keep his mouth shut.

But of course, Lem couldn’t keep quiet when Gwindor tried to drag him out of the barracks, away from his tomfool plan of theft and mayhem, so it seems more likely than not that Lem knows nothing.

Sure enough—

“He’s lying,” Lem mumbles. Then he clears his throat, speaks sharper. “He’s been a cowardly fucker, always yessing the guards and yet lording it over us, and I wanted to teach him a lesson. Then he run from _me_.”

Gothmog listens in awful quiet. There’s an empty plate laid before him. He told Harris that if he was going to be woken for no reason at all, at two o’clock in the blooming morning, he’ll have his steak and eggs served up.

When Gwindor and Lem stepped reluctantly into the man’s chamber, a woman passed them on her way out. She had tears on her face, blood on her torn clothes.

Gwindor tastes the sweet, awful heat of the lost bullet. Tastes the unimaginable grief of living beyond tonight.

Finally, Gothmog says,

“And here I thought you two were friends.”

Lem shifts from one foot to the other.

 _You fool_ , Gwindor thinks. _Trying your luck and then thinking you could defend me—_

“Can’t have friends here, sir,” Lem says.

“Sound judgment,” Gothmog agrees, almost amiable. “Sound judgment, for a place like this. Know who you are, and what you’re entitled to, I always say.”

The door opens. In comes Harris, with a steaming skillet. It smells of well-seared beef and sizzling grease, but Gwindor has no appetite.

“Ah, that’s just the ticket,” Gothmog says. “Lay it there, Harris.” He pauses, then adds, “You can take the fat lout back to his quarters.” His eyes glitter, nibbed with steel. “Soldier, you stay.”

Gwindor will not have a bold death.

Gothmog slices open an egg with the tines of his fork, so that the yolk flows out and runs with the red juices of the meat.

“You see that length of rope, Soldier? The short one, there beside the bed.”

Gwindor says, looking at it, “Yes sir.”

Gothmog fills his mouth with meat and toasted bread. Around this mouthful, he says, “Fetch it.”

_“Estrela is a little angry with me,” Russandol says in his faint, half-jesting voice. His eyes are always keen, at moments like these. Gwindor believes he is trying to ferret out the justice in his own words from how they play over others’ faces._

_“She couldn’t be. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her angry.”_

_“Because of the secret I kept.” He coughs a little. “For Fingon.”_

_For Gwindor, it was never a secret. For Gwindor, it was a horror first, and a mercy after. But it was not his hand, lost. It was his brush with death._

_When Russandol’s body fell broken against him under the Mountain, burned and bloody and still breathing, Gwindor put aside his wish to die boldly—_

_Or to die at all._

“Off with your shirt,” Gothmog says, when Gwindor has the rope in his hands. “I’m not Lewis. Stupid fucker. That arm’ll rot off him, given the chance. Nasty business, when a bullet goes in messy. I think I’ll finish him first.” He takes another bite of meat.

Gwindor unbuttons the ragged shirt, too thin for outdoor weather, that he wears to sleep. Gothmog eyes it critically as it sloughs to the floor.

“We’ll have to find a kindly purveyor of good, sturdy prison-garb,” he says. “Someone who will be willing to do a corporal work of mercy to the servile, out of the charity of their hearts.” This, through a mouthful of beef.

Gwindor can feel the rope’s spiny hemp weave beneath his fingers. These fibers’ll stick in the skin, if Gothmog means to belt him with it—

“You see those coat-hooks?”

He nods.

“Good. Go tie yourself t’one.” Gothmog jerks a thumb. “Tie yourself like a horse you wouldn’t want running off on you. Then keep quiet while I finish my breakfast.”

He cannot escape this. He doesn’t even know if he wants to, beyond the shirking fear that all men feel, when they are presented with the prospect of having their flesh torn open. He thinks, with an inward shudder, that he was a fool to believe even for an instant that Gothmog would beat him with the rope.

Gothmog eats slowly. He slurps down his eggs. Chews with his mouth open.

He makes no conversation.

Gwindor does his best to bind his hands together, but it is hard going. It would be even if he didn’t know what was to follow, what he was trussing himself for, like a dumb beast with only enough intelligence to ready itself before the slaughter. His bad shoulder makes his hands unevenly matched. He loops the rope around one wrist, then the other, in a sort of figure-eight. He fails at this; he must stoop to retrieve the pesky thing when it slips to the ground.

He is beginning to pant with anticipation. The floor creaks. The knot loosens again. Gothmog’s breath steams the back of his neck. Gothmog’s heavy hand seizes the rope and Gwindor’s wrists.

“Lem’s a damnable fool, ain’t he?” Gothmog murmurs, cinching the loops painfully tight. “He went in there to kill those men, and you tried to save him. That’s almost admirable, Soldier, if I were a man to admire anyone.”

Gwindor bites his tongue.

Gothmog slaps him lightly between the shoulder-blades. Even that makes Gwindor wince.

“Your mistake,” Gothmog says, louder, “Is that you will not come clean to me. You think you need to hide men in my own fort. I wouldn’t have killed Lem.” He chuckles. “Never mind. Perhaps I would have. But what business is that, really, of yours? You and I had an arrangement. You’re the one who stopped believing it. Who made it no more.”

There is a slither of _something_ dragging across the floorboards. Gwindor knows, trembling and trying not to tremble, what it is.

“This is the end of us,” Gothmog says. “Pity it had to happen in such a civilized land.”

_“Estrela has the kindest soul of anyone I know,” Gwindor says. “She’s been with me through thick and thin. Stubborn as I am, do you think I haven’t given her enough cause to be vexed? It’s just plain not her way.”_

_“You both are so good to me,” Russandol says. “Ever since…ever since. Is it only my own foolish head that makes me question whether I ought to be grateful for a beating? Not just as punishment, you know. But grateful for…for the kindness that followed it. I wouldn’t have known you both, as well as I did, if—”_

_Gwindor shakes his head. He is trembling, and trying not to tremble. “Estrela would always have been kind to you,” he answers. “She ain’t need another man’s violence for that. And as for me—I used you wrong at first. You know I did.”_

_“I_ might _have been a spy,” Russandol suggests, with that half-sincere look of his that is, at the same time, full sweetness. “You were just trying to protect your own.”_

_“That makes me something dreadful, then,” Gwindor tells him. “To have to see a man bleed afore I can trust him.”_

He doesn’t remember—much. Doesn’t count.

He knows that he screams.

He screams like they’re killing his Gelmir again, which is the deepest betrayal of all.

III

“For weeks and months, he was after me. _Just a little puppy, Gwindor. A very little puppy—the smallest we can find. We’ll feed him from my plate._ It was no use. I suppose I was unreasonable. I could give him a fir-tree, but I couldn’t give him a dog.”

“Huan’s mother was a grand old dog named Breena,” Russandol says. “She was my dog by default, but when I—when Celegorm took on the care of her, she thrived. Thrived _and_ produced a litter. There was a farmer…Orome was his name. He bred his sheepdog with ours. Not that you’d know it. Huan looks all hound.”

“You speaking of Huan?” Celegorm demands, stumping in. Gwindor immediately folds the specter of Gelmir back inside his breast.

“I was telling Gwindor,” Russandol says, with the ease that accompanies many of his gentler lies, “That you had to fight hard to keep Huan.”

“Oh, yes.” Celegorm sits heavily on the bench, which Gwindor vacated only a little while ago, taking Fingon’s empty chair. After Fingon’s role as amputator was revealed, he and Celegorm have moved in cautious cycles around each other, though they have not again come to blows. It is not, therefore, unusual that Celegorm enters the room when Fingon leaves it. “That’s right, you precious scoundrel—we’re speaking of you. Get in here.” Huan trots in, greeting Russandol affectionately, before coming to sit very upright and alert beside his master. For Gwindor’s benefit, Celegorm explains, “Our father was tired of dogs by the time the pups were born. Never mind that we had need of ‘em. He was set in the belief that a sheepdog couldn’t be _better_ , you see, even for a farm—because the sheepdog in question was Orome’s.”

Gwindor doesn’t see.

Celegorm laughs at his confusion. “Now you’re grasping the weed by the root,” he says. “So the sheepdog is owned by the wrong man—they didn’t fucking _get on_ , for reasons that were entirely on the side of Kelly Green. Even worse, come to that, it wasn’t an _Irish_ sheepdog…and so despite the damn pups looking _all hound_ , we’re s’posed to come out malcontent! Curse the Limeys! It’s an English dog!”

Gwindor finds himself laughing in turn. He quiets when he realizes Russandol isn’t.

“The others called a good price, though,” Russandol reminds his brother, not troubled, but not as amused as Gwindor might have expected him to be.

“Aye, they did. Kept me in duck money for a couple of years.”

“Duck money?” Gwindor ventures.

“Orome raised prize ducks. I bought some, kept ‘em on his pond. Went to shows and everything. Won prizes.” Celegorm reaches over scratch Huan between the years. “They were lovely drakes and hens, weren’t they, boy? Friendly, too. Not like geese.”

All the time that Gwindor had Russandol to himself, Russandol thought this brother gone.

Fingon returns. The mood changes. Celegorm withdraws a little. A sullenness creeps over him that reminds Gwindor, curiously enough, of Lem.

_“Hush…hush, Soldier, I’m sorry.”_

_“Gwindor,” he mumbles, through a mouth of stones and mud. “It’s Gwindor.”_

_“Gwindor? A good name. Gwindor, lie still…”_

_He isn’t going anywhere. He doesn’t even have a body._

_“They’re taking you away in the morning.” A hand settles in his hair—he has a body after all. He has a body after all, and it—_

Hurts—

_“Taking me away?” He tries to sit up. He can’t. His back is a river, but not of cold stone and silt mingling. No. His back flows with fire. He gasps, “Where?”_

_The soft, broken voice says, “I don’t know where. I am here tonight. Lem is, too. He is fetching—making brine, that is. To clean the wounds.”_

_“I was whipped,” he mutters, remembering. Remembering Gothmog’s relentless hand for ten—twenty—endless strokes. “Fuck. Damn it.”_

_“I’m sorry,” she says again. Her hand in his hair again, stroking it. “I’m so sorry.”_

_“Who are you?” he asks, for it is dark, even when he opens his eyes a slit. Dark and cold and a world unto itself._

_“Oh…” She clears her throat. “It’s Belle. One-eyed Belle.”_

He thought it would be enough, to love in a place of safety. To choose, as he has done now a handful of times, to speak what stayed secret for years of miserable bondage. The pain would be sharp; the wound would bleed. He knew that. But he had thought it would be something possible to endure.

Gwindor does not take to the stables again. Instead, when everyone is at early supper and the sky is bathed in orange and red, he creeps down to the shore of the lake. Turgon’s wall rises high behind him—a wall that, at least in certain sections, is now at the height of a man’s head, with loops at breast-level, for bullet or arrow. Just as he advised.

 _If we are attacked by men wearing blinders like carriage-horses,_ Finrod teased, _We would only have to direct them at the finished part, and be swiftly victorious._

The water is just as cold as when he and Beren took the children here, and he is more frightened of it now than he was then. He is frightened, that is to say, because he knows he could plunge beneath it forever, before they ever knew him gone.

His body wants to drown him, but he still doesn’t want to die.

“You fool,” he mutters to himself. “You’ve drug yourself all to pieces, that’s what’s wrong with you. You _spoke of him_.”

He does not go in the water. He rises from his crouching stance, and stumbles along the dull land that rims the shining water.

A better man, less broken, might finally let himself weep.

He knows that Russandol saved him—as much as _could_ be saved. He is trying to return to the favor. A poor showing.

“Gwindor.”

Estrela, her hair made curling and wild in the breeze, has come to join him. He is almost resentful of her womanly sense; her subtle attention.

“Can’t imagine I’m _missed_ ,” he says gruffly.

“You are hurt,” she says, falling into step beside him. “I do not know why. I do not need to.”

“Sight of Russandol not enough to drag your heart over the coals?”

“Every day,” she answers softly. “But we must lift our hearts out of the coals, mustn’t we? If we’re to go on.”

_He didn’t see her again for three years._

_Remember what you said to Russandol, you fool. About her kind soul, not deserving anything so low as what you give._

He looks at Estrela as if she is Belle again. “Do you remember when I went down? To the ranches?”

She nods. Says quietly, “It was horrible.”

“I was powerful glad to see you again. When we were brought back north—”

“To the railroad.”

“Aye. To the railroad.” He digs his hands in his pockets, still relearning what it is to wear proper trousers, belted, and woolen socks tucked into sturdy boots. “You and the little ones. Not that I let myself care for them _then_. Thought I was wise, keeping my cares to you, and Lem. But then Haldar…remember how we called him Twitch?”

“Of course.”

“Should’ve listened to him. Should’ve let him teach us his language. We’d have more to remember him by, now, if he was always meant to die.”

“He wasn’t,” she answers, firm with conviction. “We mustn’t think of people like that. As _meant_ to die, while they’re still living.”

“He was a good lad. And so was Russandol. You knew that from the first. How many good souls we’ve known, Belle?” He is too far gone to correct the name, spilling out of his mouth. He is speaking as if this is the last moment they shall ever have alone, as if Gothmog and his long, dividing whip awaits them on the hill above. “You endured it longer than I ever could. You didn’t let it ruin you. You—I woke to your hands on me, that night before I went away. We’d scarce spoken, afore then. And yet—yet there you were. Do you remember what you said to me? The last thing?”

The long line of her mouth twitches. He sees it clearly, for there are no tears in his eyes. Then she says, hesitating only a little, “I told you to remember us.”

“That’s right. _Us_. You said to remember _us_ , making a—a _family_ of that miserable, ever-shifting lot. God, I—” He breaks one thought and banks on another. “I don’t know why I’ve lived as long as I have,” he says. “I know why I’m living _now_ —it’s for you, and him, and the others. Hell, I count Fingon in that number, after what he’s done. And I know why I lived for Lem, even. But I—there were times when I hadn’t nothing to stay for. So why did I take my time?”

She says, just as he feared, “Perhaps you knew. Somehow, you knew what would come.”

_Now, stay behind. Don’t you off and saddle your horse—you’re not coming, d’you hear me? D’you hear me, Gelmir?_

He grips her shoulders—not hard enough to hurt her, never that, but enough to hold himself upright, almost tall. “If I’d known what was coming,” he says, still dry-eyed as the desert hills, “If I’d known—”

The words die.

“You lost someone,” she says, a single tear slipping from her single eye. “Dear friend, I know it already. I’ve known it since—since before that night. You needn’t say any more.”

 _I tried to give him to Russandol_ , his mind supplies, thwarted by the unbreakable, panicked silence that swallows him. _I tried to bring him back and lay him to rest. He had no grave. He had no body, not that looked like him. He was just a boy. He was my boy—the only creature I was put on this earth to protect. All the rest of you good souls—what can I do for you? What can I do for you, when it’s Gelmir who called my name last? I know it was my name, even when he had no—even when—_

(She told him Gwindor was a good name.)

He isn’t going anywhere. He doesn’t have a body, and then he does. Belle—Estrela—his _friend_ has her arms wrapped firmly around it, around the stiff ribs and the crooked back. His cheek is pressed against her scarred one. His forehead is stooped to her shoulder; her hands move gently over his.

Gwindor weeps. Dry and soundless at first, and then in a great flood. Estrela does not let go.

He isn’t going anywhere, and then he is.

_“What a pity there aren’t more of us,” Gelmir says, leaning his chin on his hands._

_Gwindor lowers his gaze back to the trinket he’s whittling. A little wooden dog. Maybe it will keep the lad quiet for a week or two. “What nonsense are you talking now?”_

_“More brothers.”_

_Gwindor is unexpectedly stung. But of course, Gelmir is only a child. It would not be fair to say,_ You don’t want me anymore, then? You’ve tired of me?, _so he doesn’t._

_But Gelmir understands._

_“Look at you, silly. I like you fine.” Then he smiles, fond and too wise, in the sunlit room, so that Gwindor’s heart twists in his chest. “I just—I feel selfish, sometimes. Keeping you all to myself.”_


End file.
